The Special Relationship,
a screwball romcom screenplay. I was offered an option
on this in 2001, but the prodco reneged before they paid
me any money. Needless to say, if you'd like to option it
instead, drop me a line.

The So Book of Spoons,
a collection of amusing short stories for children. Although
adults and older children may realise that many of the stories
playfully parody stereotypical tales of the genre, nevertheless
they do stand up well without any such subtext. Each one
contains a reference to a spoon, and ends in a punchline
prefaced by the word So.

Saving Myself for Maddie,
a romantic science fiction short story. This was
published in April, 1996, in the small-press
SF&F magazine Xenos;
I wrote it some three years earlier, however,
well before the
birth of my daughter, Madeleine. It was an
experimental piece, to test the effect of
switching suddenly from an iambic rhythm to
unstructured prose, and I was quite pleased
by the result. The SF content is marginal -
it's primarily a romance - so I used the
pseudonym Richard Allan,
which I prefer for this kind of material.

Learning about Love,
another romantic science fiction short story
written under the Richard Allan
pseudonym. I polished and polished this until it
shone, but the ending is perhaps too obvious for it
ever to merit publication (sigh).

Longing and Belonging,
at 1,500 words, is 75% of the minimum required for publication.
Nevertheless, for a long time, I resisted lengthening it
because I like it the way it is. Eventually, though, I did
relent, and padded it out to a more acceptable size. I
submitted it to the online magazine
Disenchanted,
because it seemed to be exactly the kind of material they were after.
Indeed it was: the longer
version was duly
published
in issue 2 (under my own name, although I had originally
intended for it to be a Richard Allan story).
Generally, I avoid writing female characters in
the first person, but in this case I made an exception: as a
result, she has a sense of "otherness" about her
which, for me at least, makes her situation seem all the
more real.